Parking

Chapter 25 of the New Urbanism Best Practices Guide

Abstract: From the moment private automobiles first appeared on city streets, parking has posed a major design problem for the public realm. In this chapter, Brian O’Looney, Neal Payton, and Patrick Siegman offer an in-depth examination of parking solutions — for settings ranging from natural areas to neighborhoods of single-family detached houses, to moderate-density areas, to city centers and urban cores.

Because retail parking lots have typically been designed for times when demand reaches its peak, more than half the parking sits empty 40 percent of the year. An intelligent parking strategy for commercial cores should provide better ways of handling peak demands, such as requiring employees to use transit on the busiest days of the year or shuttling them from remote lots. O’Looney, Payton, and Siegman present techniques such as the “Texas Donut” — unadorned parking decks bordered on two sides by a 10- to 15-foot zone for open ventilation, and wrapped on all four sides by four-story liner residential buildings — and arrangements of parking blocks in Texas’s Southlake Town Square and Frisco Square. A “half-donut” at CityPlace in West Palm Beach, Florida, and tartan street grids interspersing larger and smaller blocks are also discussed.

Mass transit may allow the parking volume of nearby residential buildings to be cut in half, but it may also result in large parking structures at some transit stations and extensive surface parking near outlying stations. The authors consider how to moderate or overcome such unattractive land uses.  This chapter explores the origins of minimum parking requirements and offers advice on how to undo them, in some instances adopting parking maximums instead.  A collection of diagrams from the Lexicon of the New Urbanism shows various methods of handling on-street land off-street parking at differing levels of density.